Pilots have long needed assistance in making decisions whether to fly given ambient weather conditions (the "go/no go decision"). If that decision is positive, they must then determine the safety of flying to a given destination airport or along a preplanned route. Presently, the National Weather Service (NWS), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other government agencies assist pilots by providing sky data including wind direction and speed, weather conditions such as rain and other relevant data. Often this information is in cryptic form and is difficult for beginning pilots to understand. This information must then be applied in the context of a multitude of regulations and aircraft performance parameters, making this a formidable task. Moreover, experienced pilots still often find the information cryptic and find it difficult to retrieve and assimilate specific data relevant to their flight from the large amount available. Confounding the situation further, commercial flight operators have their own unique regulations and restrictions supplementing federal aviation regulations which must be recognized and adhered to by their pilots.
Some systems were developed to automate the delivery of weather information to pilots. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,265,024 describes a pilot's automated weather support system. The system receives weather information from a plurality of weather reporting organizations including the NWS, FAA and others. The system then converts the weather information into cross sections for preflight and inflight use. U.S. Pat. No. 5,432,895 describes a virtual reality imaging system. The system provides pilots with a representation of all the multidimensional space around an airport. This includes weather, air traffic and spatial relationships of the aircraft with respect to the airport and the ground level.
While these patents and other conventional products can provide some level of automation to the weather reporting, these systems do not take into account the special flight rules that are dictated for airports and airspace and specific flight parameters that are unique from one aircraft and one trip to the next.
What is needed is a system that combines information including weather, terrain, map, air traffic and airplane specific parameters to supply a pilot with information that he can use to visualize his departure, enroute segment and approach to the destination airport.